Seasoning
I put summer away around this time each year. No matter what the calendar says, no matter when the equinoxes and solstices occur, the seasons change for me when I switch out my closets. The flip flops and flimsy scarves must retire to make way for sturdier, warmer shoes and wraps. The beige cotton basketweave blanket has a nice tumble in the washer while I replace it with
its cozier cousin: a microfiber cover and weighted throw. White nearly sheer sheets, too, get laundered and stowed to make way for their flannel counterparts.
Time Passages
I relish this ritual because it allows me to touch time. As an amorphous, and, by definition, fleeting topic, time has served as fodder for great thinkers and artists for millennia. Plato and Aristotle disagreed about whether time could exist without change. The former answered that yes, time exists independent of the events that occur within it. For the latter, with whom I tend to agree, the two simply cannot be separated. Heraclitus averred that “life is flux,” inextricably linking the passage of time to the changes that make up one’s existence.
As I sit cross-legged on my bedroom floor, surround myself with the representatives of each season, and oversee the changing of the guard, the passage of time becomes tangible for me. As I handle each piece, I revisit the events it represents. The diaphanous lime green scarf covered in cartoonish sheep brings me back to the Lake District in England. A friend from my Shakespeare class invited me to her wedding there. She married her long-term partner in their working barn, populated by many real-life sheep who probably resented being relocated for the occasion. Prior to the festivities, I wandered the lake-hugging streets of Windermere, near where Beatrix Potter both wrote and herded her wooly charges.
Holding the silky black one with white Chinese lettering and a red border, I hold my mother’s hand (would that I could). She brought it back for me from a trip to China after my father died, chortling when she gave it to me: “For all I know it says ‘fuck off’!” She loved well-placed profanity. Knowing it retains her DNA lets me believe for a fleeting moment that she is still here.
Surfing with Einstein and Dalí
Einstein famously declared that time “is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” that “moves relative to an observer.” He clarified this in one of his most endearing quips: “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes; when you sit on a hot stove for two minutes it seems like two hours.” Time illustrates how things change, and change illuminates the passage of time.
We resist change because it alters the comfortable status quo, and because it raises the scary twin spectres of the unknown and lack of control. But — perhaps paradoxically — change is certain and inevitable. Per Lindsay Baker, “How we handle change is the key to happiness.” The quality of those changes often determines how we feel about the fleeting minutes, months, and years. Taking inventory as the seasons change allows me not only to decide which of the approximately 73 pair of flip flops I should keep and which I can safely discard; it affords me the opportunity to process the changes that occurred between bathing suit and sweatpants season, and to consider how I’d like to use the time in the upcoming calendar segment.
Dalí, too, mulled the meaning of time in The Persistence of Memory, his melting camembert cheese-inspired clocks telling of “the omnipresence of time... and its mastery over human beings.” Yet I believe we can choose to either let us master it, or just make grilled cheese of the melting camembert and savour it. Resisting change and the inevitable flow of time is futile; riding the unavoidable waves can make the froth and surf much more fun.
Notes:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/
(https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200930-why-embracing-change-is-the-key-to-a-good-life (https://www.npr.org/2013/05/17/184775924/resetting-the-theory-of-time#:~:text=Albert%20Einstein%20once%20wrote%3A%20People,he%20said%2C%20is%20an%20illusion
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time/
(https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/
(https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20200930-why-embracing-change-is-the-key-to-a-good-life (https://www.npr.org/2013/05/17/184775924/resetting-the-theory-of-time#:~:text=Albert%20Einstein%20once%20wrote%3A%20People,he%20said%2C%20is%20an%20illusion
https://www.thedaliuniverse.com